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http://http://www.indiadefenceupdate.com/news63.html
As reported Prasun Sengupta had written about India's ATV project in Tempur Magazine and conveyed the same. He wrote the article when the subject was only being speculated in the media but on 3rd December, it was accepted as being on record by CNS Admiral Sureesh Mehta and splashed in the media and IDU tales no responsibility for the veracity of the facts but feels since it is public now the details will soon emerge and Indians should feel proud of the achievement. Only the Five NPT powers have the expertise to make Nuclear Submarines and India even if it joins the Club in a few years, Indians can pat DRDO on their backs. IDU knows the DRDO does not have such large manufacturing facilities for this multi billion project and so Prasun's pointers to Land T, Tatas, BHEL, Godrej, KSB pumps etc must be common knowledge on shop floors. The stocks of these companies are doing well and will soon be able to export these technologies as many have been developed for ISRO and DRDO. Missile Whiz Dr VK Saraswat named some of these same companies in his press briefing which have contributed to India's amazing and successful Ballistic Missile Trials, which he proved was superior to the USA's Raytheon built Patriot PAC-3.
Air Marshal Phillip Rajkumar (Retd) has written a book titled The Tejas Story
The Light Combat Aircraft, and that lifts all the veil off the project and once again it is amazing that the plane has flown over 350 sorties and Phillip was with the project and nurtured it. One day the ATV story will also be written.
IDU however sees a big challenge for India's foreign policy. India is proceeding with full speed with a newly found Strategic Relationship with USA, and yet expecting full cooperation for defence supplies from Russia. Feels odd, Russia has been generous with India. USA will never provide A Nuclear Submarine like the Akula, help in ATV as then RM Pranab Mukherjee stated in Moscow last year, supply latest SU-30 Multirole Commercial India MKIs, begin building the Fifth Generation Fighter and report it will test fly in 2009, and give Gorshkov also. The price issue can be sorted out as IDU has explained. This is food for thought.
FROM PRASUN SENGUPTA
What has been the progress on the project to date?
India's sprawling defence R & D establishment, which continues to deny the very existence of the ATV project, is now claiming that the ATV technology demonstrator is likely to be launched by 2012. In fact, one of the key reasons cited for the unceremonious removal on December 30, 1998 of the then Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, was that he had threatened to go public about the dire need for a technical audit on the ATV project, which had till then been consistently slipping its design and engineering development schedules, thanks to both the DRDO and DAE's Prototype Testing Centre (PTC) embedded within the Kalpakkam-based Indira Gandhi Centre For Atomic Research (IGCAR) being stymied by several systems integration and fabrication problems in trying to downsize the PWR and its containment vessel to fit into the space available within the submarine's hull. The DAE's Trombay-based Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 1976 began work on designing a generic, miniaturised PWR. Altogether, four different types of designs were considered.
The first, a water-cooled, water-moderated reactor, used 248 fuel assemblies as its core. The fuel was cermet in zirconium cladding. However, this design was rejected in late 1976, while the second was discarded in 1979, and the third in 1981. The BARC had shelved the first three PWR designs because of engineering objections from the IN. Despite this, BARC succeeded in fabricating a pilot PWR in the early 1990s using the fourth design. By late December 1995 the DRDO had made considerable progress in the design of a 600-tonne pre-test capsule made of titanium that was fabricated in 1994 by Mumbai-based Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co Ltd's Precision Equipment Division. From there the capsule was transported to the PTC. The capsule, containing the BARC-built PWR (with a diameter of 10 metres) was unsuccessfully subjected to on-shore and submerged structural integrity tests in November-December 1995. In June 1996 the programme suffered further setbacks following additional failed tests of the PWR and its containment vessel.
This was attributed to the unsuitable design of the reaction control-rod insertion and withdrawal mechanism. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the DAE tried in vain to buy a rod-worth minimiser (RWM) used by reactor operators to guide and monitor the proper sequences for the remotely-controlled withdrawal and insertion of reaction control-rods. By early 1997, the DRDO made serious and successful overtures to Russia for procuring shipborne PWRs and related machinery off-the-shelf. On October 5, 2000, after India and Russia inked an agreement on a news blackout on sensitive information exchanges in the areas of defence and nuclear cooperation and appointed watchdogs to enforce compliance with the new agreement, Moscow agreed to supply an initial two VM-5 PWRs, their related propulsion machinery, plus their detailed engineering drawings off-the-shelf. These arrived at Vishakapatnam in late 2000.
These propulsion systems, however, were not brand new, but were unused and originally built for usage on board civilian ice-breaking ships. In addition, Moscow insisted that such hardware be used for replication only, and be integrated with the propulsion system on-shore, and not be installed on any shipborne platform. Adoption of this approach meant that while Russia was not violating its obligations made under the NPT and START-2 nuclear non-proliferation and arms reduction treaties, it was, on the other hand, helping the DRDO and the DAE to overcome the R & D 'know-how' challenges by leapfrogging straight ahead to the 'know-why' stage. By early 2005, L & T as prime industrial contractor was contracted for fabricating the ATV's hull sections (with technical assistance from Russia's Malachite Marine Engineering Bureau, Krylov Central Research and Scientific Institute and the St Petersburg-based Central Research Institute for Shipbuilding Technology), while the DRDO's Naval Chemicals and Metallurgical Laboratory and Mumbai-based Advani Oerlikon Ltd began supplying indigenously developed metal-cutting and welding solutions to the SBC, where the ATV's final hull assembly began last year and will be completed by 2012.
The universal vertical launcher to be used for launching the BrahMos and Sagarika, called K-15, was indigenously designed and built by L & T way back in 2001 and has already been delivered to the SBC. The IN has also built a Russia-designed facility--the Special Safety Service-adjacent to the SBC for monitoring the health of the people working inside the ATV and the radiation leaks emanating from the vessel. State-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) was contracted by the DRDO to develop the PWR's heat exchanger in cooperation with Godrej & Boyce, electrical generator and the propulsion system's geared turbine (connected via a set of reduction gears to a fixed-pitch propeller), transmission shaft and gearbox, with L & T fabricating the seven-bladed fixed-pitch propeller. Pune-based KSB Pumps Ltd (an Indian subsidiary of KSB AG of Germany), is supplying the power-driven centrifugal and eccentric screw pumps and butterfly valves each comprising a cast-iron body with ductile iron or stainless steel disc and EPDM/nitrile rubber liners. Seamless piping is coming from the Maharastra Seamless Ltd subsidiary of the D P Jindal Group. Advani-Oerlikon Ltd is producing welding electrodes and machines for welding the ATV's hull sections and pipelines, while Kirloskar Electric Company Ltd is building the switchgears, water, air and chemical flowmeters, plus electrical cables, transformers and capacitors. Russia's St Petersburg-based Malachite Marine Engineering Bureau has been roped in to act as the DRDO's principal designer-cum-independent design consultant and validate the ATV's hydrodynamic design/performance parameters.
By October 2004, the first PTC-built and VM-5-derived indigenous PWR went critical on-shore at Kalpakkam. The highly enriched uranium fuel for the PWR was supplied by the DAE's Ratnahalli-based Rare Materials Project (RMP) near Mysore. Two months later, the reactor was integrated on shore with the propulsion system. On November 16, 2005, the then Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee (now external Affairs Minister) stated in Moscow during the 5th session of the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission for Military-Technical Cooperation (IRIGC-MTC) that Russia had agreed to help India build both the ATV and the 37,500-tonne Project 71 Integrated Aircraft Carrier through technology transfers. By mid-2006, a fully integrated and closed-cycle PWR-powered propulsion system was shipped to Vizag, which is now being encased within the ATV's L & T-fabricated reactor and engine compartments. By the year's end, a propulsion simulator and an IPMS simulator co-developed by TATA Power and BEL will be installed at the SBC. The integrated sonar suite is being developed by the DRDO's Kochi-based Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory and will be series-produced by BEL. The flank-array sonars' underwater omnidirectional transducers are 60mm hollow spherical elements fabricated from lead zirconate titanate type-4 material. Fabrication of the light (outer) hull and pressure (inner) hull sections is being undertaken directly at the SBC and is the most challenging part of the ATV's fabrication process.
The hull is being constructed with very high precision, since the inevitable minor deviations are resisted by the stiffener rings, but even a 1-inch (25mm) deviation from roundness results in more than 30% decrease of hydrostatic load. The total pressure force of several million tonnes must be distributed evenly along the hull and be oriented longitudinally, as no material will resist such force by bending. The entire ATV hull thus uses expensive transversal construction, with the stiffener-rings located more frequently than the longitudinals. The welding technique involves twin tandem submerged-arcs for rotated sub-unit circumferential *****, and for frame-to-hull and web-to-table tee *****. Pressure hull static circumferential ***** and sub-unit vertical seams are being welded by a mechanised (positional) FCAW process, and semi-auto FCAW is used for all other welding. For non-destructive testing and examination of the butt welds, digitised ultrasonics (using time-of-flight diffraction techniques) are being employed. If things go as planned, the front-end hull section will, by early 2009, be ready for being welded with other hull sections. For destroying ASW helicopters equipped with dunking sonars, the DRDO and RAFAEL of Israel in early 2006 began co-developing a submarine-launched air defence missile system that will include twin three-cell vertical canisters each containing a ready-to-fire Python 5 missile that can be launched by the ATV from a submerged depth of 50 feet. This variant of the Python 5 air combat missile will have a 12km range.
As reported Prasun Sengupta had written about India's ATV project in Tempur Magazine and conveyed the same. He wrote the article when the subject was only being speculated in the media but on 3rd December, it was accepted as being on record by CNS Admiral Sureesh Mehta and splashed in the media and IDU tales no responsibility for the veracity of the facts but feels since it is public now the details will soon emerge and Indians should feel proud of the achievement. Only the Five NPT powers have the expertise to make Nuclear Submarines and India even if it joins the Club in a few years, Indians can pat DRDO on their backs. IDU knows the DRDO does not have such large manufacturing facilities for this multi billion project and so Prasun's pointers to Land T, Tatas, BHEL, Godrej, KSB pumps etc must be common knowledge on shop floors. The stocks of these companies are doing well and will soon be able to export these technologies as many have been developed for ISRO and DRDO. Missile Whiz Dr VK Saraswat named some of these same companies in his press briefing which have contributed to India's amazing and successful Ballistic Missile Trials, which he proved was superior to the USA's Raytheon built Patriot PAC-3.
Air Marshal Phillip Rajkumar (Retd) has written a book titled The Tejas Story
The Light Combat Aircraft, and that lifts all the veil off the project and once again it is amazing that the plane has flown over 350 sorties and Phillip was with the project and nurtured it. One day the ATV story will also be written.
IDU however sees a big challenge for India's foreign policy. India is proceeding with full speed with a newly found Strategic Relationship with USA, and yet expecting full cooperation for defence supplies from Russia. Feels odd, Russia has been generous with India. USA will never provide A Nuclear Submarine like the Akula, help in ATV as then RM Pranab Mukherjee stated in Moscow last year, supply latest SU-30 Multirole Commercial India MKIs, begin building the Fifth Generation Fighter and report it will test fly in 2009, and give Gorshkov also. The price issue can be sorted out as IDU has explained. This is food for thought.
FROM PRASUN SENGUPTA
What has been the progress on the project to date?
India's sprawling defence R & D establishment, which continues to deny the very existence of the ATV project, is now claiming that the ATV technology demonstrator is likely to be launched by 2012. In fact, one of the key reasons cited for the unceremonious removal on December 30, 1998 of the then Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, was that he had threatened to go public about the dire need for a technical audit on the ATV project, which had till then been consistently slipping its design and engineering development schedules, thanks to both the DRDO and DAE's Prototype Testing Centre (PTC) embedded within the Kalpakkam-based Indira Gandhi Centre For Atomic Research (IGCAR) being stymied by several systems integration and fabrication problems in trying to downsize the PWR and its containment vessel to fit into the space available within the submarine's hull. The DAE's Trombay-based Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 1976 began work on designing a generic, miniaturised PWR. Altogether, four different types of designs were considered.
The first, a water-cooled, water-moderated reactor, used 248 fuel assemblies as its core. The fuel was cermet in zirconium cladding. However, this design was rejected in late 1976, while the second was discarded in 1979, and the third in 1981. The BARC had shelved the first three PWR designs because of engineering objections from the IN. Despite this, BARC succeeded in fabricating a pilot PWR in the early 1990s using the fourth design. By late December 1995 the DRDO had made considerable progress in the design of a 600-tonne pre-test capsule made of titanium that was fabricated in 1994 by Mumbai-based Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co Ltd's Precision Equipment Division. From there the capsule was transported to the PTC. The capsule, containing the BARC-built PWR (with a diameter of 10 metres) was unsuccessfully subjected to on-shore and submerged structural integrity tests in November-December 1995. In June 1996 the programme suffered further setbacks following additional failed tests of the PWR and its containment vessel.
This was attributed to the unsuitable design of the reaction control-rod insertion and withdrawal mechanism. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the DAE tried in vain to buy a rod-worth minimiser (RWM) used by reactor operators to guide and monitor the proper sequences for the remotely-controlled withdrawal and insertion of reaction control-rods. By early 1997, the DRDO made serious and successful overtures to Russia for procuring shipborne PWRs and related machinery off-the-shelf. On October 5, 2000, after India and Russia inked an agreement on a news blackout on sensitive information exchanges in the areas of defence and nuclear cooperation and appointed watchdogs to enforce compliance with the new agreement, Moscow agreed to supply an initial two VM-5 PWRs, their related propulsion machinery, plus their detailed engineering drawings off-the-shelf. These arrived at Vishakapatnam in late 2000.
These propulsion systems, however, were not brand new, but were unused and originally built for usage on board civilian ice-breaking ships. In addition, Moscow insisted that such hardware be used for replication only, and be integrated with the propulsion system on-shore, and not be installed on any shipborne platform. Adoption of this approach meant that while Russia was not violating its obligations made under the NPT and START-2 nuclear non-proliferation and arms reduction treaties, it was, on the other hand, helping the DRDO and the DAE to overcome the R & D 'know-how' challenges by leapfrogging straight ahead to the 'know-why' stage. By early 2005, L & T as prime industrial contractor was contracted for fabricating the ATV's hull sections (with technical assistance from Russia's Malachite Marine Engineering Bureau, Krylov Central Research and Scientific Institute and the St Petersburg-based Central Research Institute for Shipbuilding Technology), while the DRDO's Naval Chemicals and Metallurgical Laboratory and Mumbai-based Advani Oerlikon Ltd began supplying indigenously developed metal-cutting and welding solutions to the SBC, where the ATV's final hull assembly began last year and will be completed by 2012.
The universal vertical launcher to be used for launching the BrahMos and Sagarika, called K-15, was indigenously designed and built by L & T way back in 2001 and has already been delivered to the SBC. The IN has also built a Russia-designed facility--the Special Safety Service-adjacent to the SBC for monitoring the health of the people working inside the ATV and the radiation leaks emanating from the vessel. State-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (BHEL) was contracted by the DRDO to develop the PWR's heat exchanger in cooperation with Godrej & Boyce, electrical generator and the propulsion system's geared turbine (connected via a set of reduction gears to a fixed-pitch propeller), transmission shaft and gearbox, with L & T fabricating the seven-bladed fixed-pitch propeller. Pune-based KSB Pumps Ltd (an Indian subsidiary of KSB AG of Germany), is supplying the power-driven centrifugal and eccentric screw pumps and butterfly valves each comprising a cast-iron body with ductile iron or stainless steel disc and EPDM/nitrile rubber liners. Seamless piping is coming from the Maharastra Seamless Ltd subsidiary of the D P Jindal Group. Advani-Oerlikon Ltd is producing welding electrodes and machines for welding the ATV's hull sections and pipelines, while Kirloskar Electric Company Ltd is building the switchgears, water, air and chemical flowmeters, plus electrical cables, transformers and capacitors. Russia's St Petersburg-based Malachite Marine Engineering Bureau has been roped in to act as the DRDO's principal designer-cum-independent design consultant and validate the ATV's hydrodynamic design/performance parameters.
By October 2004, the first PTC-built and VM-5-derived indigenous PWR went critical on-shore at Kalpakkam. The highly enriched uranium fuel for the PWR was supplied by the DAE's Ratnahalli-based Rare Materials Project (RMP) near Mysore. Two months later, the reactor was integrated on shore with the propulsion system. On November 16, 2005, the then Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee (now external Affairs Minister) stated in Moscow during the 5th session of the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission for Military-Technical Cooperation (IRIGC-MTC) that Russia had agreed to help India build both the ATV and the 37,500-tonne Project 71 Integrated Aircraft Carrier through technology transfers. By mid-2006, a fully integrated and closed-cycle PWR-powered propulsion system was shipped to Vizag, which is now being encased within the ATV's L & T-fabricated reactor and engine compartments. By the year's end, a propulsion simulator and an IPMS simulator co-developed by TATA Power and BEL will be installed at the SBC. The integrated sonar suite is being developed by the DRDO's Kochi-based Naval Physical and Oceanographic Laboratory and will be series-produced by BEL. The flank-array sonars' underwater omnidirectional transducers are 60mm hollow spherical elements fabricated from lead zirconate titanate type-4 material. Fabrication of the light (outer) hull and pressure (inner) hull sections is being undertaken directly at the SBC and is the most challenging part of the ATV's fabrication process.
The hull is being constructed with very high precision, since the inevitable minor deviations are resisted by the stiffener rings, but even a 1-inch (25mm) deviation from roundness results in more than 30% decrease of hydrostatic load. The total pressure force of several million tonnes must be distributed evenly along the hull and be oriented longitudinally, as no material will resist such force by bending. The entire ATV hull thus uses expensive transversal construction, with the stiffener-rings located more frequently than the longitudinals. The welding technique involves twin tandem submerged-arcs for rotated sub-unit circumferential *****, and for frame-to-hull and web-to-table tee *****. Pressure hull static circumferential ***** and sub-unit vertical seams are being welded by a mechanised (positional) FCAW process, and semi-auto FCAW is used for all other welding. For non-destructive testing and examination of the butt welds, digitised ultrasonics (using time-of-flight diffraction techniques) are being employed. If things go as planned, the front-end hull section will, by early 2009, be ready for being welded with other hull sections. For destroying ASW helicopters equipped with dunking sonars, the DRDO and RAFAEL of Israel in early 2006 began co-developing a submarine-launched air defence missile system that will include twin three-cell vertical canisters each containing a ready-to-fire Python 5 missile that can be launched by the ATV from a submerged depth of 50 feet. This variant of the Python 5 air combat missile will have a 12km range.
